In a moment, why I’m so fascinated by it, but… if you have heard me go on and on and on about it and you haven’t seen Virtual Alabama yet and you are in DC, Tuesday is your chance. Google is sponsoring an event on Tuesday at the DC Googleplex on Tuesday morning — I’ll be moderating. You can get information and register here. (They are going to be in New York later in the week, I believe. I’ll try to get more information and post it for you.)

I’m always somewhat afraid that I’ll over-sell the coolness of Virtual Alabama — that people will see it and so, ‘Well, that’s OK.’ But most of the people who see it come away saying, ‘You know what we could do with that? We could do…’

And that is why am I so fascinated by Virtual Alabama. Because I think it is such a marvelous example of government 2.0 because it empowers people to use tools in ways that people may have never expected. And THEN they find out how inexpensive Virtual Alabama was to build.

If you don’t know much about Virtual Alabama, the program is essentially a mash-up on a Google Earth platform. (An important note: Alabama purchased a enterprise version of Google Earth, so all of the information resides on Alabama servers. Google Earth simply provides the platform, but the company does not have access to any of the data.) A mash-up is the Web 2.0 term for taking data from various sources and overlaying it on a map.

It is easy to forget how powerful it is to see information on a map. It can transform data. Imagine, for example, you see a list of addresses. It may mean something, but it is complex to understand. Put those addresses on a map and –walla! — that data is magically transformed. It becomes much more powerful.

This is essentially what Virtual Alabama does — it puts information at the fingertips of government officials who need to make decisions. In military speak, it is called “situational awareness” — and that describes it, getting awareness of a situation before you get there. So Virtual Alabama allows first responders to get access to information about fire hydrants, properties, neighboring fire departments… and it pulls it all together in one place. Very powerful stuff.